Thursday, 22 September 2016

This is kind of special. The Ruined City was not the first adventure I ever tried to write,
but coming after a series of half-baked attempts, it was the first coherent one
that survived from my first AD&D campaign. Before, there were the
beginnings of a sewer system under a ruined desert city (populated by swamp
monsters because we had no money to buy the actual Monstrous Compendium, but had an issue of a game magazine which had
swamp monsters in it); an attempt at recreating my favourite gamebook, Deathtrap Dungeon (all I remember was
the players killing each others’ characters to avoid having to share the prize
money); and something about a giant mountain-sized bird used to scare the party
into a railroaded adventure. The Ruined
City, though, was the rare adventure I actually wrote down in detail, and
managed to preserve in a paper folder. Looking back, it is fascinating,
dysfunctional, sometimes surprisingly clever, and occasionally fucked up. Let’s
delve into it.

The Ruins

The year was 1993 and RPGs were right before the
point where they’d briefly become very popular, then crash back into reality.
But before the publication of M.A.G.U.S., which would become Hungary’s most
popular RPG (and as it’d turn out, the only one of note), everyone was still
playing 2nd edition AD&D, very often taking the form of a
photocopied mess of unofficial translations and bolted-on extras. Now, 2nd
edition never properly taught DMs how to actually design an adventure in a
step-by-step way; which meant most of us picked up the absolute basics by
playing in others’ games first, studying the one or two available modules we
could lay our hands on, then a lot of trial and error. These are the roots The Ruined City comes from.

It is a bold vision: a nameless Roman-style city buried
underground by some immense catastrophe (shades of Pompeii), found in a vast
lightless cavern, its remaining sections standing on massive stone outcroppings
above a bottomless (1700 m) abyss like so many islands of an archipelago,
slowly crumbling away into nothingness. The two maps I still have were originally
intended to represent only part of the full city, but the attention span of a
13-years-old Dungeon Master made sure they were never completed beyond these
two, and the beginnings of a giant palace in section three (now doubly lost).

This is more archaeological expedition than
action adventure. There are a lot of mundane details about the city, its
inhabitants and the catastrophe that had wrecked it. There are interconnected
clues which hint at more information, or which reveal mini-stories. There are
minor treasure objects – I was notoriously, even obsessively tight-fisted with
loot and magic items, even more so than the other people in town who had DMed.
(The trick was to bring characters from other campaigns into mine, and gain an
unfair advantage over other players, because it never occurred to me to
confiscate the powerful stuff they had “earned” elsewhere.) Much of the detail
is, regrettably, superficial: it is not something that can be interacted with
much, and much of it isn’t very adventurous, unless you are into archaeology.

Still, there are some inventive details. There are
some decent navigation-based challenges, even if many of them don’t lead
anywhere special. Crumbling ledges, rope bridges, investigating a skeletal arm
hanging over an abyss. There is a secret room full of gold bars in the
courthouse, and a magic item that comes with a notable trade-off (the inability
to lie exposes the character to significant risks in a murderhobo game, which
ours definitely was). And there is, well, that
statue in the temple, one of the most 14-years-old encounters you can imagine. Believe
it or not, Riana became one of the PCs’ in-game girlfriend, and later died at the
hands of their main nemesis, the evil wizard Malvent.

Fallen Glory

The piece d'
resistance of the adventure is undoubtedly the arena on the second map
sheet, an extravaganza featuring a never-ending horse race with cursed skeletal
champions; the sinister scorekeeper; and multiple ways to become involved. This
is a set-piece encounter I’d still be proud of creating today, and it justifies
all the effort put into drawing a good arena with a compass and ruler.

If the exploration in The Ruined City is interesting but less rewarding than expected,
and the rewards are relatively meagre, then most of the anaemic combat
encounters betray a weak understanding of the rules. The 2nd edition
rulebooks didn’t put much emphasis on using large mobs of monsters to soften up
the party, nor explaining the relevance of damage output. Hence, the special
skeletons which are talked up by the descriptions in the location key are actually all complete
pushovers, since they either have no Hp to pose a threat to a group of
adventurers, don’t do shit when it comes to damage, or both. At least the
challenges get progressively stronger as you go deeper into the ruins. Which
brings us to the adventure’s conclusion (not featured in the included scan).

If you notice, the skeleton-skeleton-stronger
skeletons-even stronger skeletons theme is central to the adventure. The end of
this would be the lich living in the ruined palace in section IV, with the
understanding that the party would avoid him, and go on a few adventures right
under his nose without disturbing his rest. It was not meant to be. After
exploring the first section, and solving the arena encounter in the second, the
characters headed right for the half-written palace ruins they’d spotted beyond
the rope bridge. I tried a last ditch trick to get them to go elsewhere, making them encounter the lich on
the bridge, and giving them a stern warning to scare them off. This is how it
went:

“After its admonition, the hooded figure looks at
you with its burning pinpoint eyes.”

“I attack him!”

“I attack him!”

“I cast magic
missile to teach him a lesson!”

“He takes the damage. Next round, he wins
initiative and casts lightning bolt for
10d6 damage.”

“...I surrender! I promise to serve him faithfully
if he will just spare my life!”

This was completely out of
left field, but an opportunity no sensible DM could miss (the alternative was killing off the entire company there and then - and I was a big softy). In a move that’d establish
the tone of a long campaign that went up to level 14, the characters swore an
oath to serve Eumer the lich, gaining an important, if distant patron for the
rest of their adventuring careers. Those who had entered The Ruined City as its prospective plunderers, emerged changed as
its agents in the word of the living.

Thursday, 15 September 2016

Accidental genius or random content mill? Opinions
vary about Judges Guild, but there is a truth to both descriptions. Here was a
pioneer in its field with enormous output, sometimes with much better contents
than the cover, and sometimes... yeah, sometimes the cover, with gloriously
garish 70s commercial art, was the best part of the deal. Beyond all the hit or
miss stuff, the real fascination with JG’s game materials comes from two main
creators; Paul Jaquays with his developed swords&sorcery sensibilities, and
Bob Bledsaw’s visionary work in establishing the concept of the game
supplement, and running with the idea to blaze a trail from giant city states
to enormous hex-mapped worlds, sprawling haunted houses and a few more odd bits
and pieces.

Installment-era production values

This is not as straightforward as it seems. Much
like the idea of role-playing games seems obvious to anyone after two or three
minutes of explanation, adventure modules and setting materials also make
perfect sense in hindsight. But when it comes to establishing the formula,
going in with no precedent, guessing what gaming groups actually want in terms of support material, then
creating products to those specifications and distilling game ideas into
structured information: that takes some thinking (it may or may not be relevant
that Bob Bledsaw came from an engineering design background).

Early Judges Guild, in the period when it was a
subscription service for monthly instalments of semi-random game content, shows
well the development of the game supplement idea. The instalments, which were
later assembled into larger-scale products, had a slapdash approach to cranking
out cool stuff, consisting of:

high value-added maps with a lot of complexity and
(relatively) very good production values;

optional rules filling in D&D’s gaps at a time
when there was more of those than an actual fully realised game, clarifying and
expanding on things like wishes, geas and quest spells, negotiation, using
ability scores to attempt extraordinary deeds (in a much superior ways than
TSR’s solution), and so on;

game procedures which extended the scope of
tabletop simulation to new dimensions (such as mining for precious minerals,
trade, running a small barony, being sued at a court of law, buying and selling
slaves, picking up hot women in a sinful city state, and so on);

and attempts at prewritten adventures.

(Tellingly, there are very few, if any new monsters
and magic items, and no supplements dedicated to this purpose: those needs were
already being met by TSR’s D&D supplements.)

It is interesting that with the modular, open game
framework of early D&D, Judges Guild’s installments approach the concept of
presenting a readymade adventure from
so many different angles, and essentially come up with multiple solutions to
the same dilemma in the scope of only a few instalments:

Dungeon adventures presented in the standard “map
and key” format. This method was inherited from TSR, with a few differences:
none of these dungeons were fully described until Tegel Manor (TheSunstone Caverns discusses the dungeon
level’s powerful monsters and factions), but they incorporated a lot more
information into the maps themselves than TSR – and in fact later JG – ever would.

City adventures based on a map and key foundation,
but supplemented with a system of bolted-on charts and guidelines which turn
exploring the city into a very chaotic experience (City State of the Invincible Overlord, Modron).

Wilderness adventures presented in the form of hex
crawls and supplemented with opportunities for strategic play. This is something
that also came from TSR and its wargaming influences, but it was only really
developed by JG, turning the wilderness expedition into a set of very easily
understandable procedures (Wilderlands
of High Fantasy).

Attempts at procedurally generated adventures (Frontier Forts of Kelnore and the later
Village/Castle/Island/Temple Book series).

And last but not least, location-based setting modules.

It is this last group – site-based sandbox
components – that gets the least amount of attention in old school circles, and
which I am looking at now. All this because I want to use Huberic of Haghill.

Haghill and environs

In the shadow of the more massive JG products, the City State, the Wilderlands and Tegel Manor,
there are these small, scattered bits that are intended to be fit into a game,
but are neither fully adventures, nor fully world background. Thunderhold and Huberic of Haghill don’t work cleanly as histories or cultural
background (as Tolkien’s appendices or EPT’s world information do), but neither
do they have a precise “algorithm” to translate them into game procedures. They
don’t have a clear or even strongly implied purpose: you are on your own, and you
have to figure out how to get gameplay out of them – which is precisely how
sandbox games work.

Both of these modules have a brief background
outlining a bit of history and notes on who rules the place, a roster of local
NPCs, one-line legends and rumours, a roster of shops and taverns, and a hex
map (Thunderhold also has the Sunstone Caverns, but that is arguably a
different module). In Huberic’s case, it all takes up one very compact page,
and it is a thing of beauty.

The man, the myth, the legend

Half this module’s real charm comes from Huberic of
Haghill himself, a larger-than-life character who sets the tone for his little
corner of the world. Huberic is the kind of guy adventurers dream of becoming
after retirement: a fat, hedonistic asshole who enjoys good food and crude
jokes and lives on top of his own dungeon. We learn that he has moved into The
Tower of Torpid Terror despite the local legends; that he essentially has prudently
sealed off the entrances; that “he is especially
fond of banquets and uses every opportunity to increase his grisly girth”.
He gives gold rings to his favourites and frightens animals and peasants with
his 20’ whip. Huberic of Haghill is the kind of person I want to be when I grow
up.

The NPCs in Haghill are as random and fantastic as
anything made by Judges Guild; including Slaughter Serkart, a 4th
level Fighter with a crested helm, a huge moustache and a pair of magic boots;
Cobbler Codfall, who likes to badmouth Huberic and is friends with a shedu; and
Boomer Bronk, the village’s priest... who is a follower of Yezud the Lawful
Evil spider god, and has 6 pet spiders. What is Yezud doing in a podunk village
out there in the hills? It is all so delightfully oddball that it is hard not
to say “Yes, in fact, he is there
because...” Just to get you going, there are seven legends to follow, such
as “a vampire tree with golden apples”
and “a sea-shore inhabited by murderous
moles”. And of course, we get another page with a map of Haghill’s
environs, which tantalizingly shows us three cave mouths that were never even mentioned
in the text, and lead to the Singing Caverns, whatever they are.

Huberic of
Haghill shows both the mini-module concept’s fascination
and its limitations. It is interesting due to the things it reveals, but it
becomes a mystery due to the things it doesn’t. It remains the GM’ (sorry,
Judge’s) task to make sense of Haghill, and develop its leads into genuine
connections. And it leaves you hanging with The Tower of Torpid Terror, whose
dungeons are never mapped, let alone described, not even in manner of the
Sunstone Caverns. The potential main attraction of Huberic of Haghill is mentioned in an off-hand way, then promptly ignored.
Let me put it this way: you would never, ever get away with that kind of thing
today. And yet, it is perhaps this absence at the heart of Huberic that makes
the imagination tick. What lies below
the tower? Installment K doesn’t
tell, and neither do followup JG products. In fact, the strangeness of the
early, Installment-era Judges Guild gradually gave way to more polished supplements
as gaming became more polished and less scattershot (I was surprised to learn there
are almost three years between Installment
I and Installment Y). The puzzle
will always remain incomplete, and perhaps that is the way it was always meant
to be.

But Huberic
of Haghill shall rise again, because after much neglect, it has found a place
in my heart, and it will definitely find a place in my upcoming campaign about
adventurous lowlifes and conniving fat bastards ruling hilariously small
fiefdoms as petty autocrats. Torpid Terror beware – here we come!

Sunday, 11 September 2016

Some of the sand that goes into the sandbox: a seaside
lair inhabited by a band of smugglers. It is a typical example of what a
smaller adventure location in a sandbox setting would look like. It is functional, although a bit on
the generic side. The things that really
make such mini-scenarios interesting is how they connect to other parts of the sandbox
setting, and how it is the brief description of both a place and an
organisation. We learn that the smugglers are involved in all kinds of robbery
and illicit trade, and have unspecified links to Lady Ivlan’s assassins. We get
acquainted with their leader, who seems to use disguises to move about the seaside
towns. The smugglers may be keeping interesting prisoners. The characters may
decide to join their ranks, or slip in quietly to steal some valuable item. If
they survive their first encounter with the player characters, the smugglers
may return again and again over the campaign, helping the characters get around
unseen, or they may try to make their lives a living hell. All in all, this is
not a cliff: it is a jumping off point.

Tuesday, 6 September 2016

Sometimes a good idea is so simple that people
can’t help but overcomplicate it. Usually, it goes like this. Some people
discover (or rediscover) something and find it is good. Other people also like
it, and add their own individual spin on it. A third group of people arrives
much later, seeing an esoteric and impenetrable mess of contradictory ideas. It
does not have to be that way. A simple sandbox campaign is very easy to make.

No matter how much we talk about it, deep down, a
sandbox game is just a campaign where the players have a high degree of freedom
in influencing the course of events. This freedom is built upwards from the
level of individual decisions (“Do we
follow the Jarl’s orders or do we betray his plan to the Assassin’s Guild?”)
through adventures (“We would like to
join the Assassin’s Guild. I bet they pay better. Let’s try to get into their
good graces by doing this mission.”) to having a decisive influence over
the tone, contents and directions of the campaign (“We would like to set ourselves up as the new lords of Orthil and its
mining operations. Maybe we can get our hands on the neighbouring lands too.
Let the Jarl and the Assassin’s Guild come after us if they dare!”). A
sandbox game means letting loose a bunch of players in the game world to wreck
it (or get wrecked by it) at their leisure.

The Salt Pits

By following the three pillars of the sandbox, choices, context and consequences, the campaign grows through interaction. The more the players engage
with it, the more depth, details and connections they can uncover. If the party
keeps working against the Jarl and the Assassin’s Guild, they will discover
their web of influences through the peninsula. If they don’t engage with this
element, it remains in the background, in rough detail. The guild is still
there, lurking in the shadows, but we need not know about the mysterious lady
running it, nor where and how they ply their trade. The Jarl is a name you hear
invoked often, but all the characters will interact with will be his soldiers
and officials.

Ultimately, it is really about letting it go. If
the players discard one plotline, come up with another. If they befriend an NPC
meant for slaughter, use that NPC for that purpose. If they find the cards
turning against them, let them find a way out on their own and back out of the
adventure. Avoiding over-preparation is important, but even if you have
invested that effort into detailing a bandits’ hideout, the work you did will
come in handy later in another context (or maybe another campaign).

Some of the most entertaining games I have been
involved in were about the GM and the players throwing ideas back and forth,
and letting them turn into a complex, interrelated mini-setting: most of this
complexity came step by step through exploration and interaction, and some
through regular game procedures (such as 1st edition AD&D’s
robust and dangerous wilderness encounter charts, or simple guidelines for
running out of supplies while exploring the wilderness).

The actual recipe for constructing a working
sandbox is dead simple, and doesn’t even take more effort than writing one or
two beginning adventures. If I were to build a new dirt cheap sandbox, I’d focus on the following ingredients:

An overlandmap detailing the mini-setting where
the action takes place, with a lot of geographic variety, natural barriers and
more/less convenient routes through the wilderness to encourage interesting
in-game choices.

A few rival power
centres, from small city states to villages and strongholds, described in a
few handwritten pages each with a focus on how to get into trouble or go on
adventures.

A few straightforward adventure locations; maybe two or three small dungeons and a bunch
of smaller ruins and lairs scattered on the map. Have a bunch of one-page
dungeons that fit your tastes? This is one good opportunity to use them.

A few organisations
who can get involved – religious sects, mercantile guilds, even a rival
adventuring party or two.

Rumours to guide the action and give the players ideas, as
well as a few larger-scale legends which can become central mysteries, to be
uncovered gradually.

Your favourite game
procedures and optional rules to make adventuring in your setting a
constant challenge.

That’s it. It seems daunting, but it doesn’t have
to be written all at once – it just has to be written a bit differently than many people are used to. Some of the things
I have learned about running more and less successful sandbox campaigns
highlight these differences.

First, sandboxes benefit from having a bunch of
smaller, modular scenarios instead of
a single large one. Sure, a tentpole dungeon or a central city state can come
in handy, but the campaign framework relies on variety above everything else.

Second, while adventures are often written with
strong implications about the way to use them (which is fine in an episodic
game), sandbox gaming is at its best when there are several ways a party of
adventurers can come in contact with one of its components. A Viking village
can be a place to rest and resupply, a place to pawn off a shipload of
ill-gotten loot, a place to get into trouble at the longhouse, or a place to infiltrate
on a stealth mission.

This feeds into the third point: reusability. When
campaign elements return again and again, it builds continuity and opens up new
ways of looking at and dealing with things. You don’t just fight a group of
armed men: you fight the Jarl’s henchmen, who have been on your trail ever
since you freed those slaves. As things interact with the characters and each
other, the whole sandbox grows.

Although continuity and connectivity are also important
in other campaign structures (such as the journey or quest), they come to life
in a bounded setting – one limited by geography, the players’ interest (meeting
lots of demons in a demon hunting campaign), or any other factor.

Six, even relatively simple ideas can create odd
combinations. Much of the value of the sandbox lies in the space between individual setting elements, and
what grows in those gaps. Closeness creates links, and links hint at
interaction. The villagers living next to the giant ant hill likely want to
have them driven out. The 5th level Fighter and his retinue occupying the tower
in the forest may have designs to rule the village, and they may be intrigued
by the ruins of the overgrown amphitheatre nearby.

Seven, travel is an important part of the
experience. Travel helps tie things together, helps to establish proximity and
distance, and the game procedures you use for travel add to the content. I’d be
using the campaign hexagon system, although pointcrawls and other approaches
can work well.

An oddly familiar landscape

There are both advantages and disadvantages to
going into detail when it comes to places, people, organisations, etc., but at
the beginning, having most things at the level of broad strokes makes most
sense. It is always possible to expand on an idea later – but it is useful to
have that idea there in the first place to allow it to connect to other ideas
and grow. Looping things back to existing sandbox components creates cohesion
and generates new adventure opportunities like nothing else.

With some time, it is not hard to generate a small
folder’s worth of modular bits to use in your sandbox. Writing one or two small
scenarios or locations per session, and a larger one every so often will do the
trick. In one of our sandbox campaigns, set in Judges Guild’s Wilderlands of High Fantasy, my
campaign materials looked like this:

Slaughter in the Salt Pits: A village and
its salt mines, ruled by an evil Cleric and his minions. One of the central
places; the players ended up taking it over in a bloody uprising.

Wolfstone: A rival mining village, ruled by lawful
fire-worshippers and home to a wizardess and a trading post where many
interesting items would turn up.

Armagh: Viking village, two pages.

Caravans: A description of a few major merchant caravans
encountered on the peninsula.

Taxes and Death: When you conquer a small
village, the random encounters come to you. Guidelines for that sort of thing.

Strabonus: The resting place of an antique warlord, now
inhabited by raiding gnolls. A dungeon that became prominent later in the
campaign.

Attack of the Plant Monsters: A swamp-filled
valley containing monster lairs – the kind of place to set the objectives of a
small mission.

Gnollwatch: A few pages about a keep dedicated to driving the
gnolls out of the peninsula, mostly turned to brigandry (barely detailed).

The Smugglers of Cliff Point: Hidden caverns
ruled by a band of smugglers.

Prince Rafazin, the Lord of the Griffins: Mountain aerie of a prince who would go raiding with his pack of trained
griffins.

Zarthstone: A small town dominated by the cult of Pallas Athene
and a fair dedicated to her name, but possessing a seedy underbelly. Multiple
mini-adventures involving thieves.

The Castle of Odo Ragnarök: Castle
inhabited by vampire lord served by a bunch of corrupted crusaders (barely detailed).

The Temple of Odin: Site of a badly failed
assassination mission (barely detailed).

Underwater: A town swallowed by a lake (never detailed beyond
concept phase).

Taman Hal, the Invisible Tyrant: A major legend
about an opulent undersea pleasure palace / tomb (concept and rumours only).

That looks like a lot of stuff and a lot of work, but in truth, it
reflects only the endpoint of a campaign arc. By the time the sandbox grew to
its full size, it had fairly well developed political conflicts, local history,
legends, recurring characters and even a sense of coherence (despite the
Wilderlands’ tendency of gleefully throwing together Greeks, Vikings, Horse
nomads, Tolkien, and a lot of even stranger things in an eclectic mess). Just
like Rome, it was not built in a day, neither did it emerge fully formed from
my head: at any given time, the materials in my hand were usually “just enough”
to escape forward before the players would catch up and unmask me for a fraud who doesn’t know what is at the end of that
back alley. Some of the notes were detailed after the sessions where the
players encountered them, and more stuff remained in the form of very rough
concepts that never got developed because the players didn’t encounter them. It
is all a bit of a mess that barely fits together, and was mostly written in a
hurry, or on the long train rides between my two homes. It is a bunch of
disparate elements thrown together. When I say “dirt cheap”, I mean it.

Once upon a time, around 2006, I thought about
turning my sandbox into a full-fledged supplement (Blackmarsh before there
was a Blackmarsh), upgraded, enlarged and the serial numbers filed off. It
never happened, except for the publication of some of the individual components
through the years (it was not the first case either). I often wondered why – laziness? Moving on to other ideas
that excited me more? Too many contradictions within the mini-setting I could
no longer reconcile? All of these reasons had played a part. But I now realise
it was something else.

The magic of that campaign was found in that hard
to define dynamic quality which had linked otherwise fairly static and often
generic elements, and assembled them into something much more than the sum of
its parts. It was really about the way individual elements interacted and
collided as the characters ploughed through them. It was about immediacy,
unexpected things, and our mutual willingness to play around. And that’s why
the supplement wasn’t, and will never be made. Perhaps there will be something
else instead; something encouraging the collision of many different, seemingly
incompatible ideas, a grab bag of mosaic pieces everyone can throw up into the
air to create their own wild patterns. “Creativity
aid, not creativity replacement.” Shake it up, repurpose for yourself, and
don’t take it too seriously.